Category Archives: Aerial/UAS
Mexico City’s Transportation Revolution
Using drones, lidar, and BIM, enterprising surveyors and geospatial engineers designed and constructed the city’s first high-speed train system. Editor’s Note: Lessons learned from a problematic rail project in Mexico City prompted an initiative to pull out all technological stops for a subsequent new rail line. An innovative, tech-savvy firm that had demonstrated its capabilities...
Seven Standards for Delivering High-quality sUAS Imagery
I recently attended a pre-bid conference where the customer was interested in small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) imagery over a large enough area that mosaicking of the images was desired. What I thought would be a fairly straightforward conference turned into a knot of questions and exasperation. “How can we do this without ground control?”...
Easing the 3D Workflow
For 30 years, an Alaska-based company has been producing digital mapping and photogrammetic software to help automate the complex work of data interpretation. Photogrammetry, long the foundation of mapping, has evolved much since 1987 when DAT/EM Systems International was founded. Despite all the advances in both hardware and software, however, the latter cannot yet reliably...
Why Your First Drone Should Be a Hobby Drone: Part 2
In the last issue, we covered the idea of using a hobby drone as a test bed to learn about drones and get some low-cost, low-risk, hands-on experience. Now we’ll set up our Mambo FPV and take a few test flights. Battery charging. The first step—after opening the box and ensuring you have all the...
Lisa Chen
Surveying Solution Manager, Pix4D Switzerland Lisa Chen brings a unique set of skills, experience, and education to the booming fields of UAS-based and close-range terrestrial photogrammetry. One of the key markets for precise photogrammetry is surveying. And how fortuitous to have a surveying and geomatics engineer involved who also has experience in systems and software...
No Roads, No Problem
A unique drone (the WingtraOne) helps a team meet the environmental challenges of planning a wind farm in the Alps. At a lofty altitude of 2500m above sea level, 20 wind turbines 100m tall need to be built. These wind turbines will produce 60 GWh per year to power 15,000 households. The engineering challenge is...